“I don’t know. I’ve never been in love. I’m afraid to lose it, and you. And this. All of this. You have a duty, but more, you have a code. I knew a man like you, more like you than I realized at first. He died protecting me.”
“From whom?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Okay. Did he love you?”
“Not the way I think you mean. It wasn’t romantic or sexual. It was duty. But he cared about me, beyond that. He was the first person who cared for me.” She pressed a hand to her heart. “Not for what I represented or what I accomplished, or what I was expected to be. But who I was.”
“You said you don’t know who your father was, so not your father. A cop? Duty. Were you in witness protection, Abigail?”
Her hand trembled. Did he see it or just sense it? she wondered. But he took it in his, warmed and stilled it.
“I was being protected. I would have been given a new identity, a new life, but … it all went very wrong.”
“How long ago?”
“I was sixteen.”
“Sixteen?”
“I turned seventeen on the day …” John’s blood on her hands. “I’m not telling you the way I should. I never even imagined telling anyone.”
“Why don’t you tell me the beginning?”
“I’m not sure where it is. Maybe it was when I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor, and I knew that for certain in my first semester of pre-med.”
“After things went very wrong?”
“No. I’d completed pre-med, the requirement for medical school, by then. If I’d continued, per my mother’s agenda, I’d have continued into medical school the next fall.”
“You said you were sixteen.”
“Yes. I’m very smart. I took accelerated courses throughout my education. My first term at Harvard I lived with a family she selected. They were very strict. She paid them to be. Then I had one term on my own, in a dorm, but carefully supervised. I think my rebellion started the day I bought my first pair of jeans and a hoodie. It was thrilling.”
“Back up. You were, at sixteen, in Harvard, in pre-med, and bought your first pair of jeans?”
“My mother bought or supervised the acquiring of my wardrobe.” Because it still seemed huge to her, she smiled. “It was horrible. You wouldn’t have looked at me. I wanted, so much, to be like the other girls. I wanted to talk on the phone and text about boys. I wanted to look the way the girls my age looked. And God, God, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I wanted to apply to the FBI, to work in their cyber-crimes unit.”
“I should’ve figured,” he murmured.
“I monitored courses, studied online. If she’d known … I don’t know what she would have done.”
She stopped at the view where she’d wanted a bench, and wondered if she’d ever have reason to buy one now. Now that it was too late to stop in the telling.
“She’d promised me the summer off from studies. A trip, a week in New York, then the beach. She’d promised, and that had gotten me through the last term. But she’d made arrangements for me to participate in one of her associate’s summer programs. Intense study, lab work. It would have looked well on my record, accelerated my degree. And I—for the first time in my life—defied her.”
“About damn time.”
“Maybe, but it started a terrible chain of events. She was packing. She was covering for another associate, and keynoting at a conference. She’d be gone a week. And we argued. No, not accurate.” Annoyed with herself, Abigail shook her head.
At such times, accuracy was vital.
“She didn’t argue. There was simply her way, and she had no doubt I’d fall in line. She concluded my behavior, my demands, my attitude, was a normal phase. I’m sure she noted it down for my files. And she left me. The cook had been given two weeks off, so I was alone in the house. She left without a word while I was sulking in my room. I don’t know why I was so shocked she’d leave that way, but I was, sincerely shocked. Then I was angry, and maybe exhilarated. I took her car keys, and I drove to the mall.”
“To the mall?”
“It sounds so silly, doesn’t it? My first real taste of freedom, and I went to the mall. But I had a fantasy about roaming the mall with a pack of girlfriends, giggling about boys, helping each other try on clothes. And I ran into Julie. We’d gone to school together for a while. She was a year or so older, and so popular, so pretty. I think she spoke to me that day because she’d broken up with her boyfriend and was at loose ends. Everything just happened from there.”
She told him about shopping, how it made her feel. About the hair dye, the plans to make fake IDs and go to the club.
“That’s a lot of teenage rebellion in one day.”
“I think it was stored up.”
“I bet. You could make passable IDs at sixteen?”
“Excellent ones. I was very interested in identity theft and cyber crimes. I believed I’d have a career as an investigator.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“It’s flattering you’d say so. It mattered so much once. That day, in the mall, I took Julie’s picture, and I took my own later. I cut my hair, and I dyed it black. Very black, and I bought makeup, used it the way Julie showed me. And I’d studied the other girls in college, so I knew how to apply it.”
“Hold on a minute, I’m trying to picture you with short, black hair.” He studied her, narrowed his eyes. “A little Goth, a little funky.”
“I’m not sure, but I looked very different from the way my mother wanted me to look. I suppose that was the point.”
“Sure it was, and the other point is you were entitled to it. Every kid is.”
“Maybe that’s true. I should’ve stopped there. It should’ve been enough. The clothes, the hair and makeup. And the program she’d assigned me to started that Monday, and I’d made up my mind not to go. She would have been furious, and that should’ve been enough. But I didn’t stop there.”
“You were on a roll,” he commented. “You created the fake IDs and got into a club.”
“Yes. Julie picked the club. I didn’t know anything about them, but I looked up the one she wanted, so I knew it was owned by a family rumored—known, really—to be Russian Mafia. The Volkovs.”
“Rings a dim bell. We didn’t deal with the Russians as a rule in Little Rock. Some Irish, some Italian Mob types.”
“Sergei Volkov was—is—the pakhan, the boss of the Volkov bratva. He and his brother owned the club. I learned later it was run primarily by Sergei’s son, Ilya. His cousin Alexi worked there—ostensibly. Primarily, again, I learned later, Alexi drank there, did drugs and women there. I didn’t know or understand any of that when we met him.
“We drank Cosmopolitans, Julie and I. They were popular because of the television show Sex and the City. We drank and danced, and it was the most exciting night of my life. And Alexi Gurevich came to our table.”
She told him everything, how the club had looked to her, sounded. How Ilya had come, how he’d looked at her, talked to her. How she’d been kissed for the first time in her life, and by a Russian gangster.
“We were so young, and so foolish,” she continued. “I didn’t want to go to Alexi’s house, but I didn’t know how not to go. I felt ill, and when Ilya had to stay back, promising to meet us later, it was worse. Alexi’s house wasn’t far from my mother’s, really. I imagined just going home, lying down. I’d never been drunk before. It had stopped being pleasant.”
“It’ll do that.”
“Did you ever … when you were a teenager?”
“Russ and I got drunk and sick together a few times before we hit the legal age, and a few times after.”
“It was my first and last time, and I’ve never had another Cosmopolitan. Even looking at them makes me vaguely ill.” And a little afraid, she admitted to herself. “He had a beautiful home with a river view. Furnished with too much deliberation, I thought. Too consciously trendy. He made more drinks, put on music, but I felt ill, and I used the bathroom off the kitchen to be sick. Sicker than I’d ever been in my life. All I wanted to do—”